San Jose, CA--The
Perl Resource
Kit-Win32 Edition, featuring more than
1800 pages of documentation and the first comprehensive collection of
Win32 modules for Perl, will start shipping August 20, according to
publisher O'Reilly & Associates. It will be available during the second
annual O'Reilly & Associates
Perl Conference, taking
place from August 17-20 in San Jose, CA. The Perl Resource Kit is a
compilation of books, commercial software, Perl modules and the latest
release of Perl, version 5.005. The Kit is designed to enhance a
programmer's ability to use the popular Web and system administration
language. Suggested list price for the Kit is $149.95.

The Win32 Edition of the Kit enlarges O'Reilly's Perl Resource Kit
product line, which began in November, 1997 with the Perl Resource
Kit-UNIX Edition.

The Perl Resource Kit-Win32 Edition brings together a host of
significant, recently-released tools and software on CD-ROM and in
books. It includes the complete distribution of Perl 5.005, which
contains dozens of significant new features, such as the ability to run
threads, if the operating system supports them. Version 5.005 also
includes the integration of Win32 Perl with core Perl. This integration
means that Perl users will have just one distribution of Perl, avoiding
fragmentation and multiple builds for different platforms.

The Perl Resource Kit also includes a number of new Win32 Perl tools
from ActiveState Tool Corp. Their graphical user interface (GUI) Perl
Debugger enables easy location of bugs and swift verification of
scripts. Visual Package Manager enhances installation of hundreds of
Perl modules that run on Win32. PerlCOM enables access to Perl scripts
as Component Object Modeling (COM) objects. PerlCtrl turns a Perl
script into an ActiveX control, and pl2exe turns a Perl script into an
executable.

"Beta users were enthusiastic as they discovered how quickly they
solved common problems using PerlCOM, the hundreds of Perl modules, and
the documentation that makes using them so much easier," said Dick
Hardt, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of ActiveState. "The Perl
Resource Kit is the ultimate in middleware for Win32 systems."

The Perl Resource Kit includes four books unavailable outside the Kit.
Perl Module Reference, a two-volume compilation edited by David
Futato, covers hundreds of Perl modules that run on Win32. Significant
modules that are documented in the Reference include: database
modules, by Tim Bunce and others, which make it significantly easier to
interface with large bodies of data in common database formats like
Oracle and Sybase; a CGI module by Lincoln Stein which allows
programmers to make Web forms and parse their contents easily; the Perl
TK module, by Nick Ing-Simmons and others, which enables GUI
programming with Perl using the popular Tk program. Tk makes it
possible to create complex interfaces with little effort in the Tcl
environment. The Kit also includes Programming with Perl Modules, by
Erik Olson and Perl Utilities Guide, by Brian Jepsen.

ABOUT ACTIVESTATE TOOL CORP.
Founded by Dick Hardt, ActiveState Tool Corp. is a privately-held
corporation with investors that include O'Reilly & Associates.
ActiveState leads the industry in providing professional tools for Perl
developers, and introduced Perl 5 to the Win32 environment. ActiveState
is committed to supporting both the open source and commercial
development communities by contributing a wide range of free binary
run-time products while providing professional tools for Perl
developers.

About O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.